5/24/2010 @ 6:00PM

In Depth: America's Most Innovative Cities

America’s Most Innovative Cities

To rank America’s most innovative cities, we started with the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S. and used data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to determine the number of patents per capita. We combined it with venture capital investment per capita from the National Venture Capital Association, along with those cities’ ratios of high-tech, science and “creative” jobs from ZoomProspector.com and Payscale.com. We weighted patents higher than other categories because they are most directly tied to innovation. The results put Silicon Valley on top, with unexpected cities like Austin and Raleigh close behind.